Exploring the topics of atheism, religion, belief, astrophysics, biology, and their impacts on us. The world of the atheist is not a wonderless, unremarkable, meaningless one!

Thursday, January 14, 2010

School Science Projects > Creationism

Remember when you were in elementary school and you had to do a science project? The steps of your project were to line up with the scientific method, which was taught to you in science class. Here were the steps:

Creationism claims to be scientific. The main argument of creationism is that life appears designed, and is too complex to have arisen naturally. Therefore, the Christian god designed all life. The problem with this is that they skip all the actual science of the scientific method. I have never heard a creationist hypothesis (in the form of “if I do this, then this should happen”), and I have never heard of any creationist experiments or collected data. So let’s plug creationism into the scientific method:

- Ask a question: From where did life originate? - Do background research: Life is very complex, it could not have arisen naturally (even though evolution has shown that it can), and the Bible says God created life. - Construct a hypothesis: *missing* - Test you hypothesis: *missing* - Analyze your data: *missing* - Draw your conclusion: God did indeed design and create all life.

The sentence “if life is complex, then God created it” is not a hypothesis, let alone a theory. It is not testable, because God is an immaterial being that does not show himself in any knowable way. There is no known sign or mark that he would leave on material things to show that he has intervened. The only things that are testable are physical realities.

From this, we can safely say that your science project in elementary school was more scientific that creationism (if you did it right!).